Eli stayed on his feet, port-less. He would not be staying long.
“Don’t ruin this,” his father warned. “I could not have devised better revenge.”
If only Mr. Harper had never sent that cursed offer of reconciliation!
Eli’s father never forgave. The only thing the Harpers could offer the marquess was their utter humiliation.
So he’d set out to engender it.
Mr. Harper wanted a betrothal? He could have one. As soon as his daughter agreed to the match, Eli was to jilt her—the more publicly, the better—embarrassing her and her father both. The Harpers would be mortified to realize that neither they nor their farm held any interest to the marquess and his son. The current scheme was no more than a moment’s entertainment, like burning an ant with sunlight and a shard of glass.
That was the marquess’s plan.
Eli had been interested in Olive from the first moment he’d heard of her. His father was petty enough to enact vengeance for any slight, no matter how small, but the Harpers were the only foes daring enough to deserve a feud.
When he’d met her, that interest had coalesced into something deeper. She was everything his father feared and more: clever, talented, beautiful.
And forbidden. Then, as now.
The first of the marquess’s many stipulations to this wretched venture was that neither of the Harpers could suspect Eli’s interest wasn’t in earnest. He couldn’t simply tell Olive what he was about, then feign a betrothal and a messy split, and hope to pull the wool over his father’s eyes.
The marquess would know if Eli had followed instructions. The marquess would send spies to verify.
The marquess was here, now, because he rightfully suspected his son’s disinclination to cause Olive pain, no matter the reason.
“Be quicker,” said his father, “and I’ll give you two years instead of one. Deny me, and I’ll have you barred from your precious physic garden.”
There.
That was the reason. The carrot and the stick dangling in front of Eli’s nose.
The marquess knew his son wanted to devote himself to the science of botany, and why. Eli half-suspected his father had forbidden it all these years, just to have something to barter with when the appropriate situation arose.
Eli’s situation started the day he was born.
His mother, God rest her soul, had seemed fine at first, but the placenta had broken during the delivery, and the resulting infection stole her life within a fortnight.
Eli had blamed himself for years. Not that an infant had any control over whether a uterus properly expelled a placenta. A chemist, on the other hand… there was potential. If only he could find the right ingredients. A plant that could prevent tragedy.
“I’ve found a chemist who can turn our theory into reality,” Eli explained urgently.
The marquess looked bored. “You can lose him just as easily.”
Finding a path to the cure hadn’t been easy at all.
The year Eli was born, a group of scholars founded the Linnean Society to study natural history and define taxonomies. Their star, the great physician William Withering, had just discovered the healing properties of foxglove. It was proven to aid previously untreatable heart irregularities, including paroxysm of the heart. Foxglove’s full applications were still unknown, but countless experiments were underway for everything from inflammation to influenza.
Not for combating childbed fever, however, no matter how common death was. Women’s anatomy was not a priority when it came to research.
No cure or preventative measure would be discovered, unless Eli did so himself.
So he’d tried. Learnt everything he could about botany, about natural philosophy, even alchemy. It was plants he came back to, time and again.
“My research—” he began.
“I don’t give a damn about your research.”
“You should,” Eli said softly.
When he learned that the famous women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft had died the same way as his mother, Eli corresponded with her physicians, and amassed a web of chemists and apothecaries interested in preventing such a terrible fate from happening to more women.
Eli could not save his mother—he was too late for that—but if he could save other children’s mothers, then any sacrifice would be worth it.
The problem was that experts did not work for free.
He needed the best chemists on the project, and he had no money at his disposal to tempt them. His web of brilliant apothecaries and chemists had disappeared one by one into projects that paid and no longer returned his letters.
All except for one. In November, Eli and his last remaining colleague had achieved a breakthrough. They had analyzed countless midwives’ poultices, teas, and folk remedies, and isolated three ingredients that appeared to induce labor. Could the same plants aid in the expulsion of detached placentae? It was very promising. For the first time, Eli had concrete reason to hope.
What he didn’t have was time to waste… or money to fund the necessary experiments and trials.
“Well?” said his father. “Does twice the funding meet your approval?”
Twice the funding was a miracle.
Eli and his partner were perhaps mere months away from discovering a compound that could save women’s lives, and give more children a chance to know their mother’s love… if Eli could produce the blunt to finance the project by the end of the month.
His chemist already had an invitation to a different, more lucrative study. He needed Eli’s final offer within the next fortnight or he, too, would vanish.
The opportunity would have been lost.
Eli’s allowance was paltry by design. He had to beg his father’s approval for every expenditure. “Playing with flowers” was not an approved expense. Eli wouldn’t have been able to afford a week of the chemist’s time, much less months or a year.
Until Mr. Harper’s letter arrived.
“Two years,” Eli repeated. “Any studies I wish, at any cost?”
“You couldn’t beggar me if you tried,” the marquess said with a laugh. “Yes, yes, I’ll fund an entire team of chemists. Behold, my witnesses.” He waved a careless hand in the general direction of his hovering servants. “You can build the laboratory. It will be worth it to know I beat Harper at his most vulnerable.”
With two years of unlimited finances, a no-expense-spared laboratory, and an entire team of brilliant chemists at his disposal, Eli could achieve many more good works than his original small dream. Once this form of childbed fever was cured, they could move on to the next project, and the next.
Eli would help countless more people than he would harm.
There were just two.
Olive and her father.
Eli rubbed his temples. He wished his father’s stipulations felt more like a grand opportunity for medicine and less like blackmail.
Ever since that day behind the stables when Eli had first kissed Olive, he’d sworn never again to harm another. To do everything in his power to do as much good as humanly possible.
Saving lives was very, very good.
But hurting Olive, again...
The kisses meant nothing, she said. She didn’t want to marry him, she said.
Perhaps their fathers were right, and she would agree to the match anyway, as an obedient daughter was meant to do, despite her resentment.